Arch Linux

abutanaev

Member

From: Russia, Novosibirsk

Registered: 2011-03-29

Posts: 94

skype on older PC, high cpu usage

Hi all!

Tried recently to use my old PC (Pentium4, 2.0GHz, 1G memory) as skype machine. All went well except when using video+audio, it wasn't enough cpu to handle that. Cpu usage was 100% and there was latency in video and audio. Tested that in local area network. Then what I found, much of the load went from pulseaudio (skype about 60%, pulseaudio about 40%). I installed the thing since GNOME without pulseaudio is somewhat broken. Then I googled and tried to tune pulseaudio:

From https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio, I implemented what said in "Glitches and high CPU usage since 0.9.14", it helped with sound quality.

From http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup, in file /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

default-fragments = 8
default-fragment-size-msec = 5

And, finally, from http://linux.die.net/man/5/pulse-daemon.conf

resample-method=trivial

Something helped, after that PA cpu share dropped to about 15%, and I was able to skype with audio and video, even having couple % of cpu idle

Now comes interesting part: I went to gstreamer-properties and selected audio output to pulse. PA cpu load went back to 35%. Then a reverted it back to "auto detect", cpu load subsided to 15%. Then I remembered seeing somewhere that skype through PA emulation of ALSA takes less CPU than throug PA directly

Then I went to sleep

Any more ideas how to further optimize PA/skype to be able running skype on slow PC? I even consider removing PA altogether but I'm worried about setting sound in GNOME.

Anton